5950u running as 9800

[jgravance]

I have no idea if this is true, but ive heard from some people that you can tell some games that a 5950 is a R9800, to get better dx9 performance in games such as hl2, anybody have any info on that?

 

[Falloutboy]

you can tell it that the card is a 9800 but that would most likely slow the game it self down since it would be using a ATI enhanced programming instead of the code that they wrote specifically for Nvidia

 

[jgravance]

sorry, but how to i do this, is there an option in the game or a separate driver?

 

[Falloutboy]

some games let you change this via a console but most of the time you better off just sticking with what the programer intended...the reason why alot of programs have a seperate pathway for the Nvidia 5x00 series is because they had such poor DX9 performace they needed to scale down some effects or change how some effects were done.

 

[MisterChief]

There is this program called 3D Analyze that lets you register an FX card as an ATI card. This is especially usefull in HL-2, since ATI "sabotaged" the shaders used in HL-2 (according to Guru3D).

 

[Gentle]

Look, get the facts straight.

The problem is not with ATI, the problem is not with Valve, the problem is not entirely with Nvidia, the problem is not entirely with Microsoft (yes, Microsoft).

The problem is due to the way the FX 5X00 series cards impliments their adherence or lack thereof to the DirectX 9 standards.

Read these pages...

http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php?p=3
http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php?p=4
http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php?p=5
http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php?p=6
http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php?p=7

Page 7 has an interesting bit of info...
"Gabe tackled this head on. He openly stated that they have come to an arrangement with ATI, but that this has not resulted in any optimisations specifically for ATI?s boards, nor anything to purposefully harm the performance of NVIDIA?s ? something along these lines would be counter-productive since there is a massive installed user base of NVIDIA boards."

And then later on page 7.

"So, what is the issue with Half Life 2 and the GeForce FX?s then? One simple fact is that the GeForce FX?s pixel shader architecture just appears not to be best suited to the design of DirectX9 and it also appears to be considerably slower in floating point performance in relation to ATI?s boards - in terms of pure DirectX9 floating point performance it seems that 5900 is roughly the equivalent of 9600, however when the operations are optimised specifically for the CineFX architecture the performance can be much higher. The issue appears to be that DirectX just doesn?t provide the framework for the GeForce FX shader architecture to be at its best, and this has been shown with other titles as well."

O.k. So now onto the relevancy for the poster wanting to run 3dAnalyze.

You really don't want to run it. It is not the "magic pill" solution to your problem.

Your problem is with your hardware. Your hardware has problems with running DirectX 9 shader code efficiently. Emulating another card does not solve your problem.

Gentle